


Swallow #1

by raedbard



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Prostitute, M/M, Porn Battle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-25
Updated: 2010-07-25
Packaged: 2017-10-10 19:34:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/103468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/pseuds/raedbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Huck Ziegler, a victim of all the usual cliches, is making a living as a prostitute. One day he meets a guy in a bar who says Huck reminds him of someone he used to know.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Swallow #1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Porn Battle X, though probably also a 1st draft for something longer. (Stands alone.) Prompt was 'neon'.

Huck lies on his back, watching swallows. They wheel and scream, circling across a sky limned with crumbling plaster, obscured by patches of damp they are consumed then, racing as if to escape fingers of cloud trying to snatch them back, they emerge again, turning cartwheeled defiance. They are blown off course by the interruptions of his thoughts from the other man in the bed. His moans and soft, biological noises. There are no swallows, but Huck watches them anyway.

He's been quiet so far, this guy. Huck doesn't mind what they do, really, as long as they're quiet. There's a bruise on his cheekbone, the colour if not the pain of which is melting into his skin that says otherwise, but Huck forgets about that unless he looks in a mirror. There is no mirror in his apartment and so he catches the updates of his face in store windows and the mirrors above wash basins in the bars he goes to, after dark, collar up, pretending to be someone who he doesn't quite know. And if that boy has had his face beat up a little, what is it to Huck?

This particular guy seemed to like a little character in his faces. Huck is pretty sure that the bird wing of bruise spanning his left cheek and putting some extra shadow around his eye is what drew this guy's gaze in the bar. And once they got back to his place the guy couldn't stop touching it, pressing it with his fingertips, at first gently and then not so. He even opened his mouth over it, bit into the skin. Huck figured he must just like the sound of a reasonably pretty boy in a small but significant amount of pain, and that kind of stuff is easy to play.

"Up," the guy says, in a voice that scratches at Huck's chest like untrimmed fingernails.

Huck sits up, finding the stranger between his legs. He has spent the last half hour bent in half, his thighs crushed under the weight of this guy's torso, his calves bear pink marks where the guy's fingers have bitten into his skin, trying to keep his body where he thinks it should be. Huck knows his muscles are aching but the pain seems long ago and far away, not something to be concerned with right now.

"Get up," the guys says, not appearing to have grasped that the hand he has on Huck's shoulder is hindering and not helping Huck's attempts to do just that. "On your knees now."

He takes his hand away, taps the fingers against his thigh in an impatient kind of way. Huck gets up on his knees, still feeling the pain only in the distance of his awareness, like a dream he isn't trying very hard to remember.

The guy wants to finish off with Huck's mouth. Huck has two opinions about this, the first of which is that that's fine by him. He likes giving head, likes the weight of a cock in his mouth, gets a strange kick out of the act he thinks of as the one that, for boys like him, has the most permutations of meaning, even though the only meaning it has right now, with the guy's twenty dollar bills lurking in his wallet, is one of dehumanisation. The little tarnished core of himself, the part he thinks of as a perpetual motion machine, endlessly spinning him between sunny days and nights like this, gets off on the annihilation. This is the part that lets him close his eyes and open his mouth, tilt his head back to expose his throat; the part that takes the unpleasantness of the triggering of his gag reflex and hides it behind the weightless drift of his body, rising above this, watching the swallows.

The second opinion doesn't surface until after the guy has pulled out of his mouth, rubbed his dick across the bruise on Huck's face, slapped Huck's face, cheeks and forehead, added another bruise that doesn't show to the right hand side of his chin, and come into Huck's hair, his eyes, across his mouth, and after ten quivering minutes on his back, dressed and split, throwing down the six twenty dollar bills that is Huck's usual fee so that the paper flutters in a trail leading from the bed to the door, is formed around a wish. He wishes that, even just once, he could do this with someone who gave a damn about him, but his opinion is that not only is this very unlikely, but that it gets more and more unlikely every time he does it this way.

Huck goes to the bathroom, unaware that he is limping. He washes his face, then gets in the shower. It's the heat (and the sudden hunger the heat made it impossible to ignore) that causes his knees to quiver until he can't lock them tight anymore and has to fall as carefully as he can against the stall wall and let the water funnel down the peak his hair has made and drip off his chin. He thinks he sleeps, or faints, just for a few seconds.

He wakes and spits the water out of his mouth. He has been sitting on the shower drain and as a result there is a little pool of water climbing up to his ankles, splashing around his hand as he levers himself up. The water is running cold now. There is still soap in his hair. Huck sighs, finishes up, ignoring the pain that, having once noticed it, he cannot forget about again. He dries his body. He gets dressed. He knows his refrigerator is empty and so he throws on a jacket and goes out, even though it is almost midnight, in search of something to eat.

In practice he doesn't have to go far to get hold of a quick bite. There's a rundown burger joint a few blocks down, and down from that an Armenian take-out place, and even a 7-Eleven. He has the hundred and twenty dollars in his pocket (safest place for it) and could, in theory anyway, spend most of it on a decent meal that didn't leave a quart of grease under his fingernails. But he decides that appetite as well as frugality are best served by the burger and fries he first thought of, and makes for the burger bar.

Sitting at one of the bar's tables, scanning the other patrons out of habit rather than a genuine interest in whether any of them would make good prospects, Huck wonders if any of them know what he is, and what they would do if they did know. He munches on a fry and figures that, with this being an insalubrious diner in a rundown neighbourhood of Brooklyn, well past the time when decent folks are in bed so they can get up nice and early to go off to their cubicles and participate in the American dream, he wouldn't exactly get accused of contributing to the decay of society. But then, you never know. The guy who gave him the bruise (and the bruise, plus the general air of a body which has been ill-used that he doesn't need his own mirror to know about, is another thing which he thinks might give him away) wasn't shy about expressing his opinion. _You fucking slut_, he said, without much originality. Huck had been despising his vocabulary even as he was getting kicked in the ribs. _You dirty whore. You maggot. You're a fucking disgrace to America_, he said, as his good American citizen's spunk was still running down Huck's leg. It's always afterward that they get weird, needy, violent.

Which is why, Huck thinks to himself, picking the pickle slice out of his burger and eating it on its own so he can get the full sharpness of the vinegar on his tongue, you shouldn't fuck them in your own apartment, you moron. He broke his own rules for the quiet guy (who ran away quick enough that Huck is pretty confident he won't have to barricade his door against him anytime soon) but in the end he was the same as the others. Huck is already unable to remember his face.

In the end he gets to finish his meal in peace without any of the other patrons (there were only three other guys in there, who all look as involved in their own troubles as Huck) demanding that he be thrown out on a charge of immorality. Out in the street it has started to rain. He starts back up the block, heading for his apartment again, but at the last minute turns on his heel. He doesn't want to go back there, to the smell of come and his own unwashed clothes and dishes; he can't bear the thought of sleeping there tonight. So he turns around, and heads for the place he goes to when he doesn't want to sleep on his own.

When she opens the door on his second knock, his sister looks him up and down, frowning at the frayed hems of his black jeans and the unpolished toes of his Dr. Martens boots. Her eyes stick on the bruise on his cheek, now yellowing. She looks at him with the expression that means: I know better than to say anything, but, man, I wish you weren't so stupid.

"Can I come in, Mol?"

Her shoulders sag with the expulsion of a sigh. She is eight minutes older than him, but it might as well be twenty years. She grabs hold of his collar, the tee shirt underneath his black sweater as well, and pulls him in through the door. She kisses his cheek as though the press of her mouth might brand his skin, make him hers. She ruffles his hair and he feels about seven years old and frightened and stupid and lost.

She makes him coffee (he thinks it's a struggle for her not to order him into a chair with a big mug of cocoa) and offers a sandwich he doesn't want but takes anyway, nibbles on the crusts and then tears long strips off the pastrami slices, makes little roll-ups out of them and throws them into his mouth. Molly sits with her legs crossed on her sofa in the nice apartment in Brooklyn that her policy of working hard and taking no prisoners got her and watches him. He wouldn't do this in anyone else's house; in anyone else's house he'd be scared, sitting with his knees up to his chin and his arms wrapped around them, thinking about the curve of his back and how vulnerable it feels. But she's his sister and the rare times -- carved and polished stones of time which he has swallowed to ballast himself against the uncertainty of at least three-hundred and fifty of the days in an average one of his years -- when he's felt safe are here, with her, curled up on this sofa.

She is still staring at the bruise.

"You wouldn't like the story," he says, into his coffee.

"I don't like all that many of your stories."

"Well I won't tell you, then."

She sighs. "It doesn't help that basically anything I say right now on the topic of your safety and why I think your night job stinks is totally redundant and will have no effect whatever. That helps me out a lot, Huck."

He shrugs. "It pays the bills."

"Well, I don't like the pension plan much."

"Yeah, the dental sucks, too."

"Huck -- "

"I _am_ careful, you know that. I promise not to be the thing that gets you out of bed at two in the morning and down to the city morgue to identify a body, okay?"

"I stand both corrected and comforted."

"I promise, Mol. Okay?"

"Honestly? No, it's really not okay. And if I could stop you. But I can't. So I'll just sit here and drink my coffee."

"My choice," he says.

She sighs, nods. She smiles. It's a pretty smile, because she's beautiful, but it doesn't do anything to get rid of the tiredness around her eyes, the thin tenderness of the skin there that he knows is as soft as rice paper.

"I still think," she says, "That therapy would have been cheaper."

She lets him stay the night. (Kicking him out or denying him a night or two away from the not-as-nice-as-her apartment that his choice of career has got him would, after all, run clear contrary to her general point.) She only has the one bed and he never sleeps well on sofas, so they sleep together in her secondhand queen size, too warm in the Brooklyn night, and their limbs having arguments all their own. She pulls his head down to her breast, strokes his hair. As he falls asleep he wonders if the pressure of her fingers is enough to break his left collarbone: it feels as delicate as glass, like one good tap would cause it to shatter, and take the rest of his shoulder along for the ride. He shifts; she soothes. He sleeps, and doesn't dream of anything, which is the best rest of all.

*

The thing is that neither of them knew their father. The other thing is that, after their mom died when they were seven and their grandparents refused to admit that they even existed, they were passed from hand to hand across the state and eventually across the country; refugees of the adoption system. As often as not the hands that took charge of Molly were not the same as the ones which took Huck, and so she was not with him when certain things happened to him that set him, willingly or not, on the road to not-so-Wellville. He understood later that he was a cliche: an abused kid recreating the various acts of the shabby play he'd been cast in at twelve and a half, trying for some agency this time around. Molly went for the ground-up American dream life; he decided on a path of least resistance. But he thinks that of the two of them, she deserves the escape more than he does: she is stronger, braver, the kind of person who finds it hard to sit still, the kind of person who never understood the idea of being happy with what you already have; she's the kid they make movies about, and he's the kid who dies in the first reel. He's okay with that, it's only his sister who isn't, and so he tries not to let slip that he's figured out that he has a kind of a death wish without the help of therapy of any price, and that he's too numb to think twice about it. He suspects her of thinking he will grow out of this -- this self-destructive streak, oil-black and slickly coating every action, that he has had ever since puberty wrung his throat. He isn't anything like as optimistic.

He was in school -- CCNY, following SAT results that surprised everyone, liberal arts major, writing poetry on the sly for the student magazine and deciding at least once a month that what he really needed to make his life complete was a new edition of Frost, or the compendium edition of Raymond Chandler's three best novels, or the new manga his friend who was majoring in Japanese raved to him about, or Anne Carson's latest, or Paul Auster's, or Richard Siken's, and being content for a few days, while the words were working in him, a bolus of fantasy and I-wonder-if-I-could-ever-I-think-I-could circulating in his blood, convincing him that he could make his life count, somehow. He was in school, until the slightly-more-than-part-time job he was sing to pay his way fell in and he couldn't get another one, or couldn't convince himself any longer that the good boy he had been for the past four semesters was who he really was. He went down to a bar in Brooklyn that he knew, knew from before, and picked up a trick. With his good clothes and his black-rimmed glasses and his ability to pronounce words like zeugma even though the john didn't give a shit about its definition (_I suck at algebra and the head of your dick_), he didn't find it hard. And, having found it to be not hard once, it was doubly so the next time, and the next.

He could, of course, have paid for school that way. It would have been a little dicey, sure, a little on the uneven side as far as paying rent, bills, and checks to the university went, but it might have worked. He knows of a girl who made it work. Who separated her self from her body, and rented the latter out to nice-looking guys who wore tuxes in the evening and wanted a pretty girl to enhance the cut of their dinner jackets and throw into relief the squareness of their jaws. He thinks she graduated magna cum laude. But he found it hard to believe that there were rich widows queueing up to hang off the arm of a skinny poetry-writing undergraduate, or at least to believe that there were more rich widows than there were closeted guys in bars, looking to get their cocks sucked.

Molly went to night school, studied hard, worked a full-time job at the same time. She told him that if she never sets foot in another diner ever again where the wait staff are wearing stupid bows on the back of their uniforms it will be a fucking miracle. He had laughed, but she had been the one who moved out of waitressing and into a good job with Child and Family Services. She makes her rent and she can afford cable TV; he has weeks where he has to scrape rent together and weeks when the money is wadding up in his pockets, but he doesn't even own a TV -- he catches re-reuns of old movies instead. He gets crushes on the old movie stars, just for something to do, a hobby for his heart. So far he's checked off James Stewart, Gene Kelly, the obligatory passing interest in Stewart Granger, James Mason, the English actor Stanley Baker. There are no patterns that he can see in these men; or not patterns that he is willing to see. He falls for the qualities of the film: he favours black and white movies, which are not only visually stunning but appeal to him as a way of depicting the vicissitudes, the twists, the layered unfairnesses and chance occurrences of life; the shadows falling on James Mason's face pick out both the texture of his evil, and the beauty of his cheekbones, his thick dark hair. That the movies themselves tend towards a simpler, as it were black and white, kind of morality, just amuses him even more. When he tells his sister about these theories, and the fantasies that accompany them, she just shakes her head at him, smiles. You're not right in the head, kid, she seems to say.

He started small: just a bar or a club, a tight shirt and tight jeans and making sure to have his hair fall into his face, sipping whiskey like a sissy, watching. He is always watching, comes with the territory (the territory of being an orphaned ex-foster kid for whom the punchline "touched inappropriately" isn't so funny, and the plainer business of being a writer), but this is watching with intent. He watches for apprising gazes, for the slavering looks, for the eyes of men who are searching for something they can possess, just for tonight.

He has never been picky about the men. He figures he can't really afford to be. They're not dating, after all. It's just bodies, fluids, proximity, the heat from skin, the grip of fingers, the sour taste of someone else's come. All those things can be ignored. They need not bother him once they're done, over. There is a part of him, sometimes, that _wants_ to freak out -- that is a second away from punching the john in the face and tearing out of their, screaming its head off -- but he locked it away a long time ago. He thinks it might even be dead. Well, you know, him or me, Huck always thinks, him or me. Sometimes it reaches for him, at night, or on the street, or when he's sitting in his apartment drinking coffee and between projects, wondering what the fuck he thinks he's doing. Sometimes it reaches for his throat. And sometimes he lies down with it, and breathes in its dead stink.

He went the anon sex route for a while. As practice, almost. Glory holes in back bathrooms in bars in Brooklyn, full of bastards. The anonymity turned him on, or at least lit up in black light the areas of his brain that would cause his psychiatrist -- if he had a psychiatrist -- most cause for concern. For a month, six weeks, he lived for the burn moment, the vessel moment, the moment in which, as a man he's never met shoots come into his mouth, he is eradicated: his photograph burns up in the Ministry of Truth, he has no name, he has no body that isn't his mouth, his heat, his depthless nothingness, his atoms scattered out across the five, eight, ten, twelve seconds it takes one guy to come. Oh god, oh fuck, oh man. That's so good, that's so good. I'm coming, I'm coming. Like Huck doesn't know.

And the other Huck, the dead one, whispered to him. This is good, more of this, more of this. And so, because he's never been anything if not contrary, Huck stopped. He even went straight, for a while. Molly found him a job temping in her office and, having geared herself for a long fight on the topic of why people should be wage slaves and not prostitutes, if only because it's easier to remember what to put on your resume, was shocked when he agreed, without protest, to come along. And, briefly, he became what he thinks he would have been in a different universe: a quiet boy who took a few weeks to stop flinching when people talked to him, who needed smoke breaks every hour (for the nicotine and for the chance to be alone, just for five minutes, breathing his own air), and who got a predictable crush on a predictable guy. He wondered at the time if working in daylight was destroying his confidence; figured it was just the sheer _straightness_ of the life. He was good at the work, though, really a lobotomised ape, had it been given an ergonomic keyboard and taught the alphabet, would have been good at the work. But being useful for something other than his ability to give good blowjobs was different, and, for a time at least, agreeable. It was the guy that fucked it all up, in the end.

He was sweet. Named Stephen. A little older than Huck and only a little less shy by virtue of those extra years on the planet. And almost stupidly innocent. Huck had taken six months to do it -- six months of sitting opposite this guy in their office, at first wary of him, then only a little anxious, and then, as they talked, figuring maybe he'd made a friend. They started spending lunch together. They went out after work. Huck spent his time drinking in the shape of Stephen's jaw along with his whiskey; Stephen being flushed and happy, talking about TV shows Huck had never seen. Huck started flirting; Stephen flushed a little more. They went back to Huck's place, and Huck let habit take over. In fact he laid it on kinda thick. Touch me. There, there. Please. Oh god. Do you want me? Do you want this? Can I suck your cock? Will you fuck my ass? All of which was a little too much for Stephen.

He was _sure_, that was the galling thing. Stephen might have been closeted but he wasn't straight. They'd never had the conversation -- that awkward exchange of euphemisms -- but Huck knows his business, how to judge a glance; it _wasn't_ all in his head. Fear might have been trying to swallow Stephen whole but did he really have to break the sound barrier trying to get out of there, making little anxious sounds that magnified into screams in Huck's ears, like someone was tearing into his skin with sharpened fingernails? Stephen ran like Huck had been trying to pull his balls off, saying -- screaming -- over and over, 'I'm not a fag'. Some unresolved issues there, dead!Huck had said. Huck told it to shut up, then jerked himself off, then cleaned up.

Huck had cried, too. Between the jerking off and the cleaning up. He hadn't known he was crying. He'd felt the tears dropping on his hand, on his wrist, and assumed it was come. That he couldn't see straight, that his eyes were burning, didn't seem so strange. He couldn't think straight, either; had Stephen's frightened little moans occupying too much space in his head. Once he'd come he'd realised that his face was wet and that he couldn't breathe. So he wiped his face on his last Kleenex, then blew his nose. Then put on some tighter jeans and went out to the nearest bar and found a trick and turned it and came home and slept until noon the next day. So went the experiment with feeling, and the experiment with paid work. Even if he hadn't failed to turn up one day, thereby almost certainly getting himself the can, his pride wouldn't have let him sit across from Stephen for one more day. Molly tried her best, but he wouldn't budge. The next night he earned triple his wage packet, counted swallows, and woke up the following afternoon with nothing worse than a sore ass and no memory of how he got home.

*

He was late, the new guy. Meaning that he comes into the bar about forty-five minutes from the time that it usually empties out completely (if not the time it actually closes) making it unlikely that he's looking for trade. He's tall and good-looking in a symmetrical kind of way (Huck isn't impressed by symmetry, on the whole) and he looks like the kind of guy who never quite knows what he's doing. He's clumsy, too -- almost walks into the corner of the bar, apologises to a stool, then straightens his jacket and makes for a table. A waiter goes over to him. Huck turns back to watching the door.

Some little time later, about half an hour, Huck feels a touch on his shoulder.

"Can I buy you a drink?" the symmetrical guy who walks into bar stools asks. He's looking at Huck like he's seen him before, and Huck tries to remember whether he's ever taken money off this guy, or lain in his bed, or even just unzipped his pants. He runs a quick check: the guy has small hands with perfect nails, a stiff, awkward way of standing, and he smells clean, not of cologne but like he's just stepped out of the shower. Huck doesn't remember him.

"Sure," he says. "Uh. Whiskey. Ice."

The guy nods, orders whiskey for Huck and a beer for himself, then sits on the stool beside Huck, then abruptly gets back up again.

"You, er, you don't mind if I sit here?" he says, sounding genuinely worried.

"No, man. Sit where you want."

"Thanks," he says, smiling like Huck's just done him a real favour, and revealing perfect teeth as he does so. Who the fuck is this guy? dead!Huck asks. Some kind of fucking movie star? Huck wearily tells his death wish to shut the fuck up, and takes a swig of his whiskey. Then he finds himself running his fingers along the rim of the glass.

"You always drink whiskey?" the guy asks. His voice is a little too soft for the bar; Huck can hardly hear him over the shitty music. He's leaning on his elbow, looking at Huck, his other hand wrapped loosely around the neck of his beer.

Huck shrugs. "Usually. It always tastes the same and I don't have to remember which brand I like."

The guy smiles. "Jack Daniels."

Huck nods. "Yeah."

"That's interesting."

"Is it?" (Why are you playing hard to get? dead!Huck asks. What the fuck? You think this guy and his Armani suit isn't worth a try? What are you nu -- )

The guy laughs, but the sound is sad. "You remind me of somebody, that's all." He sighs, takes a swig of beer. "He always drank Jack."

Huck frowns before he can stop himself. It's not like he hasn't heard this line before and he has no problem believing that it's even been true a few of those times, but the way this guy said it -- like an admission; a secret he has never told anyone except Huck; a secret he was keeping curled under his tongue until tonight, this bar, this particular boy -- leaves no room for doubt.

They talk a while, as the bar empties around them. He says his name is Sam. It's another thing Huck is certain he isn't lying about, though he has no idea when he got to be such a good judge of other people's falsehoods. Transferable skills, dead!Huck says to him. These are the things you learn when you suck cock for a living.

Sam has dark hair and a square, slightly too short jaw that is stupidly sharp at the corners. He is one of those people who always look tanned and make Huck feel really Jewish. (The one reliable piece of trivia Huck knows about his father is that his father was, or is, a Jew. His mom's word, and his lack of a foreskin, are his proof.) Sam also has the bluest blue eyes Huck has ever seen. Even in the bar, whose lights go from white to blue to ultra-violet to pungent neon green in the space of five minutes, Sam's eyes are remarkable. They smile too easily. They look inherently truthful, like they couldn't let their owner get away with a lie even if he wanted to. This both amuses Huck, and makes him suspicious. Such eyes, and the owners of such eyes (and for that matter, the owners of such All-American general good looks), are not to be trusted.

"And you thought you'd find this somebody I remind you of in a dive bar?" Huck says, not sure why he isn't just doing the usual patter.

"No. I'd ... No. I just. Got lonely, I guess."

That's your cue. He lined it up good for you there, dead!Huck, says.

Instead, Huck nods. "Yeah. I know what you mean."

It could be a line. He's used that line. Unhappy older guys the world over are in search -- so experience, psych 101, and popular culture in general have taught him -- of someone who is prepared to say the words, "they don't understand you, but I do". Huck'd go with a guy who said that to him. Or at least a guy who said it and sounded like he meant it. And maybe because of that, and maybe because of Sam's honest eyes, when he says it, it doesn't sound like a line.

"You want another?" Sam says, gesturing towards Huck's drink.

Huck nods. "Sure."

The bar throws them out eventually. It's been raining again and the streets outside glisten in the neon light so prevalent in this part of town. Huck takes hold of Sam's hand and pulls him into the alley behind the bar. There are a few other guys there. Huck ignores them; Sam stares at them, looking uncomfortable.

"Just don't look. C'mon."

"But -- "

"Just c'mon."

He's taller than Huck is, about six foot. Huck pulls on his collar to get him to lower his head. When they kiss, the sensation goes straight to Huck's dick. Sam's mouth is soft and tentative, like he hasn't kissed anyone for a long time, like he never really knew what he was doing when he did. Huck finds himself stroking Sam's lips after he's broken the kiss.

"My place?" Sam says, quietly.

Huck nods. "Yeah."

Yet another thing Huck isn't sure about is why he didn't just go on his knees and blow Sam right there in the alley. He was hard, was trying to angle his hips away from Huck's body so he wouldn't be able to tell. He thinks you're just any guy in a bar, dead!Huck whispers. He really is that innocent, that sweet. Like Stephen. Maybe it'll be the same as --

Shut up.

"Huh?" Sam says. They are in the street now, walking either towards a nicer part of Brooklyn or the subway for Manhattan. The rain is heavy now, reverberating in Huck's ears. He didn't realise he had actually spoken.

"Nothing. Where we headed?"

"Uptown," Sam says. It is the last thing he says for a while.

*

It is so easy to fuck him. Sam is just as gentle as the voices in Huck's head supposed they would be. He sits beside Huck on the edge of his own bed and they kiss and touch each other. It feels exploratory, juvenile, almost, like two kids on the back seats at the movies and so, to Huck, pretty weird. His instincts are pushing at him, channelling his thoughts towards the small bright point of Sam's orgasm. But Sam doesn't seem all that interested. He's hard, sure, but he seems more concerned with biting all around Huck's lower lip, using his teeth to pull gently at the flesh, then dabbing at the bites with the flat of his tongue, like tasting a popsicle. Huck starts to pull at Sam's shirt, scrabbling for buttons, but Sam gets hold of his wrists, pushes him away. He kisses Huck's palms, the pale twist of his wrists, then turns his hands over and kisses his knuckles and the veins on the back of his hands.

"Your hands are just like his," Sam says, and before Huck can say anything (You got a good reply for that, do ya?) Sam is kissing him again, his fingers in Huck's mouth, too.

Most of it is a blur, but a pleasurable one. Sam seems to want to ignore his own body and concentrate on Huck's. Sam lays him out on the bed, undresses him slowly and carefully. His fingers stroke Huck's skin like he's afraid to leave prints, or disturb the pale colours of Huck's flesh with pink twists and pushes. He frowns at the bruises around Huck's ribs, but doesn't ask how they came to be there, just kisses them, carefully, like he's tending the wound. It is those kisses that make Huck hard; undone by the strangeness of tenderness. Sam smiles, but to himself, as he undoes Huck's jeans and pulls them down over his hips. He gets rid of Huck's boxers, and gives his dick a friendly stroke, like patting a dog hello. Then he sits, his thigh warm against Huck's hip, and just looks at him, and occasionally rubs his fingers through the hair on Huck's belly and chest.

"You are just like him," Sam says, quietly, ponderingly. "Or, well. What I imagined."

"You didn't -- ?" Huck asks, equally quietly.

Sam shakes his head. "No. He was married. Is married, I guess. I didn't even really know him that long."

"How long?"

"A couple months, I guess. No, I know. I could pretty much tell you the number of days," he says, looking at Huck with what looks like embarrassment but which Huck suspects is masking a kind of fierceness, a refusal to apologise for -- what? Love, Huck supposes. "But not very long," Sam says. "Stupid really, falling for straight guys."

Huck hikes himself up on his elbows. "It happens, man."

Sam looks at him, like he's hoping -- so hard -- for Huck to be right.

"Happened to me," Huck says, before he's even thought about it.

Sam nods. "Really sucks, huh?" he says, smiling sadly.

"Yeah."

Sam opens his mouth to say something else, maybe even to ask what Huck's deal was, who the straight guy who broke Huck's heart was. Huck kisses him instead. Bodies, not feelings. Panic rising, buzzing at the back of his throat. He wants to get on his knees and present his ass to Sam, tell him to just fuck him already and get on with it, work out whatever bizarre psychological issues he has with some guy who might not look anything like Huck on his own time. Sam's hands reach out again and for a moment Huck thinks he is going to hold his wrists in place again, flip him over onto his chest and get down to it. But Sam is just holding his hand.

They kiss, they touch, they grope. Push, squeeze, twist, lick, suck, bite. It's fucking, just like fucking always is, and though Huck is intrigued, it's all the same as ever, and he's counting swallows by the time Sam is panting and sweating somewhere at his back, fucking him in his earnest way while Huck buries his face in Sam's sweet-smelling pillows. Sam comes bent right over Huck, his chest tight to Huck's back and his hands pushing Huck into the bed. Huck hears him say a name, just in a whisper. He cant make out what the name is. Sam pulls out carefully and as he does so Huck realises he's come himself and there's a mess of semen on Sam's sheets.

Huck turns around, ignoring, as usual, the pain in his muscles. He half expects Sam to be crying, but he isn't. He's cleaning himself up with tissues, peeling off the condom Huck didn't even need to insist on. He looks up at Huck and smiles. He throws the condom at his trash can and misses, sighs. The next thing he does is thank Huck, like he's really done him a favour. Somewhere in a black corner of Huck's mind, something is rolling its eyes.

*

Later. Sam has made coffee and insisted that Huck at least stay to drink it. Until he does so Huck realises he hadn't really understood how much older than him Sam must be. Forty at least, maybe even fifty. He doesn't look any age at all, is all clear skin and smooth muscles. But his voice knows how to be tired; Huck gets the feeling it rarely knows anything else. So he stays. He's tired anyway, would like to sleep, even though the gathering semen stain in the centre of Sam's bed needs to be dealt with first. He figures Sam will be fastidious enough to do it. He figures he can just close his eyes for a second.

Sam's hand wakes him, stroking Huck's hair.

"Hey."

"Hey. Sorry. I -- "

"Don't worry about it. You looked really tired, there."

Huck nods. It feels like months since he really slept.

"Come to be," Sam says. "I changed the sheets."

Huck smiles, despite himself.

*

"How did you meet him?"

"It's a long story."

"So give me the short version."

"A political campaign. Jed Bartlet. I don't suppose you remember him."

"No."

"Doesn't matter."

"And, this guy -- "

"Toby."

"Toby."

"Yeah. He worked there, too. I was a lawyer, but that was his thing for real. What he did. Worked on unsuccessful political campaigns. Never had a win."

"Not one?"

"Not one."

"So he kinda sucked?"

Sam shakes his head. "Actually he was the best. He was stupidly good. Is. I don't know."

"Uh huh."

"No, really. This is not just infatuation talking."

"I'll take your word for that."

Sam laughs. "Anyway, he didn't get a win that time. I hope he did in the end."

"And he was married?"

"Yeah."

"Shit, man. I'm sorry."

"He really loved her. It's okay."

"But you didn't get over him?"

Sam shakes his head again. "No."

"So what happened?"

Sam laughs without any humour. "I quit my job. My other job. Or, rather, I didn't go back. My firm were just waiting for me to come back to them, looking for a job and a little professional humiliation, but I couldn't do it."

"So -- what d'you do now?"

"I work freelance. Advertising, a little copy, very occasionally articles for newspapers. Mostly I write. You know, fiction."

Huck says, "Wow," without stopping to think.

Sam's smile is crooked. "Helps that I have rich parents. Or, had. My dad died a few months ago. This grand apartment you see around you represents a dramatic change in my circumstances."

Huck nods. He stops short of offering any information of his own; tricks don't want to hear that stuff. Dead!Huck mutters something about _Sam_ not being a trick since Huck hasn't actually charged him any fucking money yet.

"You got a picture of him, this Toby guy?"

Sam smiles. It's a smile Huck remembers from grade school, when a kid would get asked about his particular hobby or interest and take enormous, if slightly embarrassed, pleasure in telling everyone all about it. Sam gets up from the bed and roots around in his pants pocket for his wallet. (He keeps a picture in his wallet? Jesus, guy, you really got it bad. You'd think that -- ) He opens the wallet out, carefully, holds it between his thumb and forefinger and shows it to Huck. On the left there are lots of cards, pieces of I.D., plastic embossed with American Express. On the right there is a photograph, trapped behind the plastic window in the wallet. It shows Sam, grinning his stupid naive grin, and another guy. Sam has one arm around the guy, and Huck can tell, even from just this one picture, exactly what this Toby meant to him.

Sam puts his wallet away. They sleep. Huck does not dream.


End file.
